1. “Sanitation is more important than independence.” Mahatma Gandhi, 1925

2. Did you know that one in three people in the world do not have a safe, clean and private toilet and a lot of those people live in Africa?

3. Having access to a toilet is a basic human right and without good sanitation human waste can destroy communities.

4. Not having a proper toilet can lead to diarrhoea which kills many people, children in particular are especially vulnerable.
Statistics from UNICEF show that 1600 young children die every day from diarrhoea related illnesses

5. Here in rural parts of Gambia, some of us go to the toilet in fields, bushes, ditches or rivers.

6. Some of us use squat latrines, which either flush or use buckets of water to take the waste away
And we have pit latrines, which do not flush. They are a hole in the ground connected to a bigger hole under the ground.

7. We don’t always have toilet paper. We often clean ourselves with water.

8. In the larger towns we have flushing toilets like you do.

9. In our schools we have outside toilet blocks which look like this.

10. Jack Sim founded a World Toilet Day to raise awareness of the lack of toilets across the world.
He is known as Mr Toilet!

11. World Toilet Day happens every year on 19th November and aims to raise awareness of sanitation problems around the world.

12. You can watch a musical video from Louie the Loo here:

13. Having a wee or going for a poo is something that we all do, but it’s often something we don’t talk about because it’s thought of as rude, wrong or funny.

14. But can you imagine not having a toilet?
Can you imagine not having somewhere clean and private to go when you need to relieve yourself?
In your country it’s probably very hard to imagine this.

15. Let’s finish with some interesting toilet facts...

16. Toilet fact 1:
More people in the world have a mobile phone than a toilet.

17. Toilet fact 2
The world's most expensive toilet is in Hong Kong and is solid gold and worth over three million pounds. (£3,000,000)

18. Toilet fact 3
In your lifetime you'll spend three years sitting on the toilet.

19. Toilet fact 4
The flushing toilet was invented by Thomas Crapper!

20. Toilet fact 5
The biggest ever roll of toilet paper was 2.97 metres in diameter. You could wipe a T Rex's bottom with that!

21. Well we hope you liked learning about toilets
Well we hope you liked learning about toilets. We will be in contact again soon. Bye.